>> live from pier 3 in san francisco, welcome to "bloomberg west," where we cover innovation, technology, and the future of business. i'm cory johnson, in for emily chang. after 34 years, steve ballmer is ending his direct association with microsoft. ballmer has resigned from the microsoft board just days after paying an nba record $2 billion for the los angeles clippers. "street smart" anchor trish regan spoke to him talking about his life after microsoft. >> when you think about what you're going to be doing over the next 12 to 24 months and

you're still on the board of microsoft and you have this project now in front of you, how you divide your time? >> i retired so i could have the next phase of life. i'm feeling a little strapped right now. [laughter] i will have to wrestle that through a little bit. i have other things am also interested in. i think of myself -- i want to have more time for myself including more time to study, teaching a class this fall at a business school, more time for sports and golf, that kind of thing. on top of that, i want to be a great microsoft shareholder. i want to be a great clipper owner. i'm trying to figure out how to evolve my civic contribution. my wife has been really active particularly in child welfare

and education issues in the state of washington. we are asking ourselves what else. it will take some energy to figure that out. >> you have a lot on your plate. do you think you'll stay on the board? >> i'm on the board today and i'm excited to be here as a board member. >> what a trick answer he gave yesterday. trish joins us now. did you call him out? >> he clarified it as the news came out. i spoke to him about 30 seconds after that he was in fact leaving the board. he said, and i'm going to quote, i want to be a great shareholder and i want to pay appropriate attention but between teaching classes and my new responsibilities at the clippers, it's a lot. he went on to say that he loves microsoft. i said to him on the phone today, i thought when i spoke to

you yesterday that this might be coming. i did not think it would happen in 24 hours at a very much got the sense in the interview that he was distancing himself. talking about the layoff being nadella's responsibility on the board not having much to do with that. really talking about the direction of the company now being different. emphasizing how strapped he was for time with all that he has going on right now. >> it similarly amazing how much he played for the clippers. $2 billion? >> he said he wanted the team and he thinks he got a phenomenal deal. he was willing to pay whatever it took. when we talked about valuations in general he said if you look

at the valuation of some of these tech companies, a basketball deal like this doesn't look so bad. as he went further into the conversation he did say cheap money as a lot of the reason we are seeing these deals happen and it's really fueling the lofty asset prices. he laughed as only steve does and said it may have something to do with the basketball price, too. he knows it's a lot of money. he was the highest bidder and he wanted the team. if you are steve ballmer and you have billions of dollars, you can pay $2 billion. >> you missed out on the team in san francisco. "street smart" anchor trish regan, hard worker. stay with us. you have even more news. you spoke to the guys from uber who just made a strategic

hire, david plouffe. next on "bloomberg west." ♪

>> welcome back to "bloomberg west." i'm cory johnson. uber has hired a new campaign manager, former obama political strategist, david plouffe. he has served as a bloomberg intervening editor. he will start with the company in late september. trish, what did he have to say? >> i asked why he was going to work for a tech company out or

his experience in washington. i asked travis why he desired to hire david, someone was such a political background to work at a tech and transportation company. what they both had to say makes a lot of sense. >> the whale like to think about it is uber running a political campaign and the candidate is uber. i'm lucky to have just partnered with the best campaign manager in the world. that's what it's about. we are in cities around the world. we need to get the positive story of uber out there. the taxi cartel is resisting the process we are bringing to the cities. >> david, you've had a phenomenal career in washington. why go to work for a startup? >> travis and i have spent a lot of time talking. i was a customer and strong believer in the company. we had a great mind meld.

he's built a great company here with great people and great mission. the opportunity to be involved in something like this could be a once in a generation experience. i believe that providing transportation alternative should not be an issue. cutting down on distracted driving, helping businesses and people move around the city. i think ultimately this kind of rye grass, this kind of change, it's hard to stand in the way of. people will put up a fight and we will be prepared to make sure we are fighting for the transportation alternative. >> you will be fighting regulatory challenges not just in the u.s. but all around the globe. we were just covering the protests recently in europe. how does your experience lend itself to this global atmosphere? >> there are some similarities.

the fundamentals of a good campaign, making sure you understand your story and who you want to tell it to, leveraging our assets. uber has a remarkable group of customers and drivers passionate about the product. you rely on people on the ground. even when i ran a presidential campaign, we had to listen to those on the ground. there are regional general managers around the world who know those communities and know best. the headquarters is there to support them. >> travis, let me ask you about allegations that have surfaced from lyft. they are saying uber is playing dirty tricks and alleging that you booked 5000 ride didn't cancel them as a way to thwart competition. what do you say in response? >> a lot of this plays out on the insider track. at the end of the day,

competition is good for the consumer. if you are out on the court, if you are lebron james, you want to dunk on somebody. competition can be fun but at the end of the day at the better for the consumer, the driver. >> did the employees do it? >> 10% of all requests ever made in the system are cancellations by people just using the system. it's a natural thing. there was never any kind of intention or anything like what was being proposed. we just categorically deny it. the accusation of first place was the real dirty trick. >> let me ask you about something that has been controversial. you have drivers frustrated by the changing discount rates. you may say you have one price and then announce a 20% discount and some drivers are frustrated

by that. there predict and they're sort of on economics based on one rate and it changes to another. how do you deal with that and keep your drivers happy, wanting them to work for uber while giving our best, most competitive rate customers? >> description is a little bit of a mis-categorization. the only time prices come down is when the trips per hour go up. we bring prices down and we have seen consistently across the country and the world that drivers are actually making more because they are making up for more than the price cut in trips per hour. what we do before the price cut happens is be given discount to the user before it even comes down to verify that trips per hour fundamentally change, a price elasticity. drivers make more when we drop prices.

consumers are getting iran the cities cheaper and drivers are making more money because of it. you get to a certain price point and they stay much busier and they are able to bring more income home to feed their families. >> an interesting interview. that's the first time we heard travis categorically deny the accusations lyft had been making. superduper campaign manager david plouffe helping the president when the last two campaigns coming into a company that certainly needs a lot of help when it comes to the battles they are fighting in cities across america and the world. >> what a fascinating company. to get a guy who's used to so much herding of cats --what running a campaign is -- it's great. >> we will have to continue watching it.

>> trish regan, thank you. next, how google vaulter may search engine -- how google is evolved. an in-depth look at google's past, present, and future is remarked the ten-year anniversary of its ipo. ♪

>> welcome back to "bloomberg west." 10 years ago today, google began trading as a public company on the nasdaq selling more than 19 million shares at $85 a pop. it was not your everyday ipo. they almost got in trouble for an interview with "playboy" during the quiet period. they say it warned of such

things that google was not "a conventional company." when they did go public, they used a dutch auction. after the unusual start, shares have never fallen below the ipo price. we have a look at google's golden decade and what may come next. >> over 100 billion searches per month, 1.1 billion android devices activated, 500 million gmail accounts. just some of the numbers behind their staggering success. in its first decade, google has grown from 3000 to 52,000 employees. they have a market cap 17 times its ipo valuation. on the way, google has become a fixture in popular culture. the name, a twist on a math term, has turned into a verb used around the world.

google product help users find where they are going, see what their house looks like from space, what mountains look like a world away. the core remains search. they have a 67% share in the u.s. and google is still not satisfied. >> when i think about search, it is such a deep thing for all of us to really understand the world's information. we are still very much in the early stages of that. >> search has helped google become an advertising juggernaut. with all of that cash, google has ranch doubt big time buying youtube turning it into the world's largest video site -- google has branched out the big time. >> there are 1.1 billion android users and we activate something like 1.5 million per day. >> there have been allegations of user tracking, scanning e-mails, manipulating page

rankings. >> we need to show what data is being collected. >> awareness means thinking about the future, reaching for the stars. >> it is about doing brand-new, risky, technological things that are making science fiction real. >> the moon shots include google glass, the self-driving car, robots, even trying to prolong life itself, identifying the ideal healthy human being. it grew from a garage to the world's largest search engine and now a company searching for breakthroughs people have only dreamed of. >> and that was emily chang. as we look back at google, three men who played a key part in building google maps and google calendar. brent taylor, former group product manager and shadow

puppet ceo, and a former coo, ben leg. i started by asking off how the world saw google as they prepared for their ipo 10 years ago. >> google was really misunderstood. selling things based on clips, prices percolate, understanding the economics of digital advertising was not something people were used to. they had to educate the market on how to think differently in terms of roi and digital. >> you are there at the time of the ipo. we always try to talk about products but it was a fairly amazing moment for the world. what do you think the world thought at that time? >> companies went public with less information known about them then because there was not a well-developed secondary market.

how they are doing multibillion-dollar financing that was not available. when google went public it is the first time they saw the business. >> i was covering it for another network at the time and the numbers were just phenomenal. 170% year-over-year growth. >> people were incredulous. you mentioned the paperclip advertising, also a new concept. people were just in disbelief. it took a number of years of being a public company before people realized that it was a sustainable business. i think it's hard to describe how stark that was compared to now where these private companies get so much press and knowledge ahead of an ipo. it was a different time. >> i was on the original google calendar team. it was one of the first applications google built

outside of the search after the launch of gmail. i worked on that team and launched google calendar. >> at the time, there were so many parallels to yahoo!. i don't know if you guys know that story but they essentially owned a piece of the company and there was a lawsuit and overture about it. launching the calendar business was interesting because it showed big plans to do a lot more. was that the original plan with calendar? google always had a mission to organize the world's information. the founders had a really broad theme and it was not just information you could find but information people kept in their e-mail or had in their calendar. there were not really big tools for doing that in an online, shared way to give you unlimited storage.

it was really an extension of that. >> did you have a sense that the advertising world was going online and even going into search? >> at the time, people saw online as an interesting sideline. to give you a sense of how seriously they did or did not take it, generally was given to one person, maybe not the best person. it was not something where they said we have to get it right. it's interesting. maybe i will throw money at it and see what happens. it took several years. if i spend more money buying clicks i can build my brand. it was a three, four, five-year journey to really educate the market. >> they just sort of extrapolated that we must all be billionaires which is obviously

not the case. i have to say most of the people we worked with and google it was their first job out of college and it was a very idealistic company. to have been financial windfall where you could afford a house in the bay area, like no one else, was a real blessing. for us it is a very formative company in our careers. no matter how they laughed or what they worked on that got it in a really positive way. we really learned about technology and how to make product. it was a nice financial base for our families. it was a really impactful company. it really cannot he understated. >> bret taylor, carl sjogreen, and ben legg. next on "bloomberg west," from music streaming, home monitoring services, you name it.

google is doing it all. we look at why and what it all means when "bloomberg west" continues. ♪

>> you are watching "bloomberg west," were a focus on innovation, technology, and the future of business. i'm cory johnson, in for emily chang. google started out as a search engine and it has become a whole lot more. from search and ad technology to mobile phones with the android project. google also has projects coming out of the google x labs that read like science fiction -- self-driving cars and curing disease. we are talking about google's success, challenges, and future opportunities.

>> googles international revenue is something like half of all of its revenue. google generally has much higher market share outside of the u.s. than inside. it's really important for google overall. focusing on engineering and innovation, it would be the same cost of whether it was a u.s. only company or international. the fact that half of the money coming international funds a lot of innovation. to put it another way, if they did not have the same cost, they'll would probably not be making much money right now. >> i think they would just spend less money. what is it internally, bret? what is the focus on what to spend, how much to spend? they have tremendous returns on equity and tremendous profits as well. how do they think about spending within google?

>> it has evolved a lot over time. it started growing large after the dot com bubble burst. when i left college, one of the only two hiring -- >> i did not think about that. >> they got all of the best engineers and business people because there were not many jobs left. at the time, it was a bit of a free-for-all. they criticized google a lot -- >> not me. >> not you, but a lot of people did. at one point around 2006, it got formalized into this -- what is it -- 80/15/5. 80% spent on search, 15% on peripheral projects and then 5% on out there projects not directly related to core businesses.

that changed a lot after larry page took over as ceo when he had the more wood behind fewer arrows mandate. >> that was three years ago about when we started "bloomberg west." >> a lot of the moonshot explorations are doing in googlex and a lot more iterative product development in the core areas with a focus on unifying the product line. >> carl, was the raw always a focus on getting to a profit or this thing has to have a 40% operating return? >> when i was there, that was really not in the picture rattled. it was about building a product users love and getting the scale. >> let me unpack that just a little bit. make something big and widely used even if it costs more? >> with part of interesting about google's business is you really cannot make it

interesting unless you have scale, a product that you use because you are monetizing at pennies per ad click. you're focusing on getting to a product that lots of people loved and used. >> in terms of bringing in the coin, what was the approach of google in the last five or 10 years about ringing in money and selling ads? how did not evolve? >> google focused on building something that consumers like. once you got a decent audience, then how do you make money? the first goal is to push it fast, iterate fast, and then to say that this is a product therefore it's ok to sell ads. occasionally they would be subscription based. how do you get the right ad to the right consumer at the right time?

does it hurt the consumer experience? then ramp up slowly once we have the right model. >> why does google do this crazy stuff that is so far from search? a self driving car is not organizing the world's information. >> i think larry and sergei started with an academic start. when i got to google the most distinctive thought was how ambitious and academic itself. people were willing to take very complex approaches and not be intimidated by that prospect. the culture of google is really unique and why it is such an enduring company is they're willing to work on technology problems that scare other companies away. it's a credit to them that they are willing to continue. it's pretty distinctive. if you look at the missteps through xerox pox where they are -- park where they are unable to monetize.

>> they had great things like the mouse, the pc, graphical user interface. i make fun of google glass as much as the next guy but i think how interesting it is they are taking these research development in trying to turn it into product. it reflects well and how they approach which i think is pretty different where the research group is off on the side. >> bret taylor, carl sjogreen, and ben legg. coming up, as we celebrate google's first updated as a stock, we look to the future of google as a company. that is next on "bloomberg west." watch us streaming on your tablet, phone, and on bloomberg.com. ♪

>> welcome back to "bloomberg west." i'm cory johnson. we are marking google's 10th anniversary as a public company. we are looking at what's next, artificial intelligence and other so-called moon shots have been a big part of the company. i started with talking to the ceo of clarify via skype, another ex-googler.

he recently tested out the self driving car. i asked john why google is researching driving technology. >> google is doing this because driving is such a transformative opportunity. tackling the challenges of driving will really push mapping and the ability to bring search into the physical world. i think the opportunities are enormous. >> why do you think an advertising technology company is doing things like robots, cars, and so on? >> i don't think they are just advertising. this can apply to any different tech applications, search,

targeting the ads. it could be helping to find other products. they can use their expertise to leverage that with different applications. >> john, let me ask you about that in terms of machine learning. we rarely talk about that here at "bloomberg west." can you kind of explain that and why we would see that in other google operations? >> taking examples from training data and use that to do prediction or matching the future things in the amount of data that google and other companies like facebook have acquired is so enormous. by developing something called deep learning, almost a virus infecting the academic community it is so powerful, it provides the ability to really mine and exploit all of the data to make better predictions and

ultimately translate that to useful services and products. >> matt, do you see advertising as the ultimate goal of all of these things whether it's learning to solve problems away from this desk top computing, whether it is glass or robots? >> i don't think it's the ultimate goal. i think there's going to be many others for google and similar companies. it is at the core of the technology. i think monetizing self driving cars are different avenues where that could be applied. search but not necessarily self driving cars. >> what is artificial intelligence to google, matt? >> it's making use of all of the extreme amounts of data that they have selected and making it more useful to the end user

using very simple algorithms to do that or applying more sophisticated algorithms. it can have a large amount of data and interesting things. where they started really with search, now they are incorporating very sophisticated algorithms to improve all-around. >> to what end? they have this mountain of data and now they are increasingly giving the capacity to understand it and apply that artificial intelligence to do what? >> it's really improving the way that users interact with data. it could be mavs. it could be e-mails. it could be how they find things on the web. it's very valuable to not only google but the end user. >> what about you, john? what do you see google doing in the future? how do you think we will look at

this company 10 years from now if indeed it exists 10 years from now? >> the exciting thing about robotics is it to bringing this technology into the world. the science of programming work so imagined fulfillment and warehouses -- >> the science of programming work? >> imagine the ability that anything we can do manually that can be ultimately be done through robots that can interact. the challenges are tremendous that the opportunities are enormous. >> it's just amazing to think about 10 years ago that this sort of financial event, a weird ipo for a dutch auction would lead to -- john, where were you 10 years ago? did you imagine you would be working on this kind of work with google? >> i have not started the robot car project yet but i was building underwater robots at

the time. if i try to use my crystal ball and think 10 years from now, i think there will be more robots in our everyday lives. a big question is how do you achieve this sort of physical scale up? they do this amazing scaling in mountain view and i was really blown away last month. how do you achieve scale up in atoms in terms of the physical world? we will have robotics. i'm not sure if it will be like science fiction movies, but the clever people at google and elsewhere will find ways to do useful things to help people and it will have a value leading to robots and uses we never thought of. >> matt zeiler, the ceo of clarify, and john leonard, robotics repressor. household being targeted by hackers. personal data on more than 4

million patients has been stolen. we tell you who was behind it and exactly what they stole next on "bloomberg west." ♪

>> welcome back to "bloomberg west." hackers hit community health systems which operates hotels mainly in the south. they stole social security

numbers, birthdays, and addresses of 4.5 million americans. they believe the intact came from china in the months of april and june. from streaming video to crowd source images, technology is playing a central role in telling the story of the protest in ferguson, missouri. what technology is actually being used by the citizens and law enforcement as well? i'm joined by dave simmons and peter. it allows anyone to share safety-related videos and is used by several law enforcement agencies. we talked about how the technology of twitter and facebook is helping to spread the story of what's happening and what happened. what is law enforcement doing in those regards? >> law enforcement and the public can use mobile technologies to essentially share photos and videos in real time and be able to geotag and

map the content so it is actionable. >> what do you mean? >> being able to crowd source and share is a really valuable tool for law enforcement and public safety but also for the communities as a whole so they can share that information in real time. >> i don't know if it's my facebook feed and my friends, but this has really touched a nerve with people. they are coming out talking about it. what are you seeing? >> we are seeing four or five channels from citizen journalists. >> you have live channels become their own broadcasters. >> that's right. you can go live from a mobile device of to an hd broadcast like you do in a television studio.

>> back to ferguson. what are you seeing? >> we have four or five citizen journalists and they have turned to our platform because it's very easy. they are providing their own commentary and point of view. >> is it fair to say there's not one point of view? >> it is somewhat diverse. the people who tend to initiate those broadcasts are showing what it's like for individual citizens on the ground. it is sometimes overlooked are the major media outside the u.s. where we see a lot of activity. >> i don't know if it's accurate but there is a sense that it's uncensored. it is more raw than you might see on a broadcast network such as ours. >> we see that. last year when everything was kicking off in ukraine, a number of citizen journalists set up cameras there to share in uncensored view of what was happening as they worked their

way toward greater democracy. >> peter, talk to me about the business you do and how it changes the events of what we are seeing like in ferguson? >> no matter how many cameras are there, they will never be as close to the action as smart phones. there are over 2 billion smartphones worldwide and people are actively engaging in these types of events. >> engaging in what way? i'm just curious. i feel like there's a great big business opportunity presenting itself, not to be callous about the horrible situation, but money being spent. i wonder how that changes the technology. >> the public is demonstrated that they are willing and capable of actually supporting their communities with smartphone technology by sharing information and that's what this is really about. it's about being a good neighbor and supporting each other.

>> i guess it's about being a good neighbor. it does not feel neighborly. david, in terms of the opportunity this presents for you, how do you generate revenue from this business in terms of what's going on in the story? >> ustream has evolved to also be a platform that businesses can use to get across local events that they believe need to be shared more widely. businesses are no longer dependent to figure out the content they want to share. they can share whatever they think is important is really using a platform like ustream. we want to enable them. >> dave gibbons and peter mottur, thanks. the bwest byte where we focus on one number that tells us hold on lot. today's number in the newsroom, adam what do you have? >> 600 billion dollars, the

market valuation of apple that crossed today. they are inching towards a record and crossed $100 per share for the first time since 2012 accounting for a stock split they had earlier in the year. the stock is having a nice little run here. >> we are talking so much about google and the 10-year anniversary but apple back then, it was under $20 per share before the split. it's amazing what it's become. >> a few years ago i went down to apple's annual shareholder meeting and i met a few overtired schoolteachers who bought when it was down in the doldrums. they were enjoying their retirement on the fruits of that investment. >> quite an enjoyment, i'm sure. more "bloomberg west" tomorrow. thank you very much. ♪

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